"Skype is Back to Normal" – Sign-On Problem Solved As of 11:00 AM GMT Today

"Take a deep breath. Skype is back to normal." With these two sentences, published at 11:00 am gmt, the management of Skype announced the company's return from the worldwide outage that began early Thursday afternoon as users around the world began to find they couldn't log on and make phone calls or send instant messages.

On Monday, we’ll provide a more detailed explanation of what happened. Until then, we’d like to apologize and thank you. Precisely in that order.

We know how difficult and frustrating the past two days have been. And still, your good wishes kept flowing in. Thank you for the amazing patience, trust and support!

UPDATED 18 August, 2007 11:00 GMT

Skype had a short outage in 2004 due to a DNS problem, but this time the outage lasted longer than ever before.

On Thursday evening Skype's Villu Arak said that the sign-on problem occurred because of a deficiency in an algorithm within Skype networking software. "This controls the interaction between the user’s own Skype client and the rest of the Skype network," he explained, adding: "The Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen."

"Rest assured that everyone at Skype is working around the clock — from Tallinn to Luxembourg to San Jose — to resume normal service as quickly as possible," said Arak.

Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

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